The rain was coming down hard all last night, and so I was ready for a wet one. I put on all my gear, grabbed the extra large umbrella, and went outside in the downpour. Once I got out there it wasn’t so bad. The downside of the large umbrella is that it catches the wind easily, so I have to be more careful about holding on to it.
I had four classes today. My first class started but no Japanese teacher showed up. The class and I waited around for about five minutes, but it seemed liked nobody was going to come. I had no idea who was supposed to be there, and I didn’t want to leave the class there while I chased all over the place looking for the teacher. I made a judgement call and taught the class alone.
Some of the exercises had to be adapted because I had designed them with two teachers in mind, but really it worked out just fine. The students did pretty well – I think they were amused to see me working without a net. It was a first year class, so they haven’t been around long enough to know how abnormal the situation was. I handled things in English throughout the class, and switched to Japanese when students got confused.
After class I found out that Mr. Kimura was supposed to be there. He was pretty embarrassed that he forgot, so I think I’ve got a free beer coming from him one of these days.
Mr. Hayashi finally booked my flight back to the USA today. I fly from Osaka to San Francisco on July 16th, with a couple of hours stopover in Seoul. I get to spend about two weeks in California, and then I get back on the plane on August 2nd and fly back to Korea. I have to spend a night in Korea, which saves me some money but also costs me some money in hotel bills. I think it’s some kind of kickback system by the travel agencies, but that’s fine. It’ll give me a chance to eat some more spicy food before I get back to Osaka.
After school I met up with one of my ESS students, Harada-san. She normally takes her bike, but the rain was so heavy that she took the train today. I rode the same train back, and she sat next to me and we chatted in English only the whole time. I noticed that we were getting lots of dirty looks from other passengers. I have a feeling talking with students on the train and maybe sitting next to them is a bad idea. I’m not sure, but I took my cue from Harada-san and enjoyed the chat. A while back she asked me only to speak to her in English so that she is forced to learn, so our conversation was slow but pretty wide-ranging.
Back home I organized a couple of loads of laundry and decided to fire up my new grill. It’s just a ceramic bucket with a grill on top and a little air duct on the bottom. I tried to get the fire going, but it was pretty smoky, and there wasn’t much heat. Luckily I had a backup plan, and had a pan ready to fry up the meat if the BBQ didn’t work out.
While I was waiting for the rice to finish cooking, I peeked out the window at the barbecue, and while I was in working on other things, the charcoal had turned red, and that sucker was putting out some heat. I threw some more charcoal on the coals, and in five minutes I was grilling my meat.
The meat is really thinly sliced here, so it cooked fast and I was in business. I grilled up beef and also pork. I had marinated the beef, and the pork went on just with a dusting of black pepper and some spicy stuff my folks had sent me a couple of days ago.
The meat tasted great, and my whole back porch smelled like roasted meat. The lady next door came out of the balcony to see what was smelling good, and I gave her a big wave and a grin. She was probably getting a big cloud of smoke blowing into her place when I was trying to get the thing started – I’m lucky she didn’t call the fire department on me.
